Representation of the People Bill

Lord Hayward Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 2nd November 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

My Lords, I shall follow on from my noble friend’s comments and pick up the question that the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, referred to earlier about double, if not treble, registration. The noble Baroness said that she hoped that all universities and academic centres will ensure that they have maximum registration of people resident in that town or city as voters. However, those people will have a home residence as well. Therefore, one is inflating the electoral roll in university cities to the disadvantage of those communities in other parts of the country that do not have university cities nearby.

The noble Lord, Lord Rennard, referred to boundary reviews and political advantage. I must admit that I enormously admire his comments about parliamentary boundaries in these circumstances. The places with high levels of student registration that will benefit under automatic registration are the big cities—the Londons, the Manchesters, the Birminghams. As he explained to his Lib Dem colleagues, come the next boundary review, there will be fewer constituencies in Somerset, Wiltshire, Dorset and other similar counties, such as Gloucestershire, a fair number of which, much to my chagrin, currently have rather large numbers of Liberal Democrat MPs.

I make the point quite seriously that, if one is going to include all those people who register for a second residence, one will be expanding the electoral rolls dramatically in London, Manchester and Birmingham to the disadvantage of the shire counties. I do not think that is an appropriate route to go down. There may be solutions where people register at their first home and their second residence is not included for, for example, parliamentary boundary revision, but we cannot have a position whereby large numbers of people are registered to the disadvantage of resident communities in neighbouring shire counties.

I make these comments on the basis that I have heard from a number of people, particularly the Liberal Democrats, that they want free and fair elections. Free elections are that people should be allowed to register to vote themselves—encouraged, yes, but they should have the freedom not to do so. The Bill goes through at inordinate length, saying, “Oh well, we’ll register everybody, and if you don’t want to be on the electoral roll you can deregister”. However, the process involved is pretty tortuous, and large numbers of people genuinely want to hide where they are for a whole series of reasons; I take, for example, abused women as a case in point. They are going to be on the electoral roll, and it will not be a case of, “We will take you off immediately”, because people will not know that they are on until they are notified that they are on.

That takes me to another point, which is that we have to register all these people so that we can improve turnout. Might it not be a good idea if politicians—and I include in that category noble Lords and those in the other Chamber—improved their reputation with the public at large so that those people want to turn out to vote?

Talking of which, the Government have a very good website where you can register to vote. I could walk out of this Chamber now and register immediately. People might wonder why I had nothing better to do, but on Saturday evening I actually went on that site. What astonished me was that 54 people had registered in the preceding few minutes. I challenge noble Lords to go on it on Christmas Day; they will be astonished by how many people register to vote on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. It is not that difficult.

My noble friend Lady Coffey referred just now to the fact that, in an election period, 2.8 million people registered to vote—it was just between 2.8 million and 2.9 million. The problem there was that some 40% of those people were already registered. One thing we have not done today is given enough credit to both the Public Bill Office here in the House of Lords, for the speed with which it has drafted and ordered our amendments, and the day-to-day work of returning officers around the country. I shall return to this subject at a later point, but those officers do a phenomenal job. If you have 2.8 million extra people registering to vote during an election, as I say, that seems to show it is not that difficult to do it—and, by the way, if all those students who are moving off to university are unable to go on to a website, I have a serious doubt about whether some of them should be at university in the first place.

The 40% of people who registered at the last election who were double-registered imposed an enormous burden on the returning officers. I have said over and over again that we should move to a read-only access process. In other words, if Robert Hayward wants to check whether he is on the electoral roll, he just goes on the website with his password and can check that he is there. Instead of that, because Governments of all persuasions have refused to introduce a read-only system, we impose a burden on returning officers which is unacceptable at the time of an election, when they are trying to administer all sorts of other things.

It is not difficult. We have been told by government and officials over and over again that it is an expensive and difficult process. Is it? Local authorities—

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My noble friend has correctly highlighted how the process actually works if you go on the Government’s website, and so many of the district councils or other local councils which are registration authorities have their own skin in that same machine. When you type in your name, date of birth and national insurance number, the system goes automatically to HMRC and the DWP to validate you before you have even pressed the button; they will validate you almost immediately. I think the point my noble friend is making, which is absolutely correct, is that having this unique identifier—the national insurance number or some other method that might be defined by regulations—gives an absolutely unambiguous way of determining whether you have a duplication.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for his intervention, which was slightly longer than I had hoped for, since I want to keep to my time. As I say, there is a system; we were told it is impossible, but what have the Northern Irish done? They introduced a read-only system and have done that themselves. It operates effectively in Northern Ireland without any problem.

These massive changes are, I believe, unnecessary—although, yes, they were advertised—and without great benefit. I will quote now from the impact assessment, to which I may return on another occasion. On page 113 it says that

“we assume that the completeness of registers will increase by 3 percentage points (from 85.9% to 88.9%) by the end of the 10-year … period”.

Are we going through all these changes for that?

In conclusion, I must pick up the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, on his comments about my support for automatic registration. I believed that I had made it absolutely clear that I support it for attainers, whatever age they may happen to be, because I want to introduce them to the democratic system. Thereafter, I do not support automatic registration for that very small gain.

[Lord Pack (LD)]

My Lords, we have heard two interesting contrasting themes in this group. Some of us are very keen on automatic voter registration and want to see it introduced sooner and better. Others are nervous about the potential implications of automatic voter registration. I think it is worth starting with a recap of the reasons why something like automatic voter registration is required, particularly as the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, eloquently put the case against.

In part, it is because making good use of data is, when done well, an effective way of improving services and reducing administrative burdens. It is worth contrasting how a registration process would start under AVR with the current system. Several noble Lords have expressed concerns about how a database might result in registrations flowing from that data. However, under the current system anyone can request and be sent a paper form that they can fill in, without having to provide a national insurance number. That, under our existing system, is enough to start the process rolling for registration. If we are relying on the right, good-quality datasets, that is a much more secure starting point than anyone being able to request a paper form that anyone could fill in. It is also worth bearing in mind that the current system was very well described by one of the international experts in elections we are lucky to have in this country: Professor Toby James. He called it a

“Victorian system in need of repair”.

I think this Bill’s efforts to repair it are very welcome.

A good example of that is the surge in registration applications we typically have in the run-up to a general election. The Electoral Commission’s latest research estimated that between 7 million and 8 million people are either missing from the electoral register or registered at the wrong address. There is a substantial problem that needs addressing. We have heard that in the run-up to a general election there is a surge in applications; for example, last time, there was a surge of nearly 3 million. As was rightly pointed out, many of those were duplicate applications. When you strip those out from the numbers and compare that with the 7 million or 8 million missing and wrong addresses on the register, even the general election surge is not getting us that far towards fixing the problem.

Action is needed. Of course, we should not therefore think that any action is wise. But I hope, therefore, we will hear positive noises from the Government, particularly on Amendments 49, 50 and 52 from my noble friends Lord Rennard, Lord Wallace and Lady Thornhill, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Royall and Lady Bennett, all of which in different ways would improve the supply of data into the system.

My Amendment 58 would provide ward-level data, which I think is important, particularly with local government reorganisation increasing the size of many councils. Council-level data will not tell us how well or how badly registration systems are working in future; we need that data at ward level. We need it to understand how the system is working. We need it for researchers and experts to figure out whether the promises are being delivered. We need it for the campaigners, of all parties and none, who are trying to improve involvement and engagement with democracy, to be able to see where their efforts are most needed. We need it for media, and indeed for us politicians, to be able to understand how systems are working.

I turn to some of the other amendments in this group. On Amendment 8 from the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, I must admit I am not convinced by the case that the noble Lord made. Under the current system, with a voting age of 18, we register attainers with some aged 16 and most aged 17. The current system is that some people who are two years below the age for voting get registered as attainers. That is because of the use of the 1 December cut-off date and the following one-year window, which means that some people may be more than one year away and need to be in the records.

If we are changing 18 to 16, it seems absolutely sensible that 17 and 16 should, in turn, also get reduced by two years to 15 and 14. Therefore, with respect, the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, would achieve the opposite of what he argued for. We have an existing system that is well established, that people are used to using and that works; by reducing the years across the board, we are essentially transferring the existing system over to the new voting age, rather than creating a new system that would not work with the 1 December window and following 12-month period.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

The Minister just referred to pilots. I ask this question out of genuine ignorance; I am not trying to make a point. Can he provide us with details about the level of accuracy that the Northern Ireland register now has, given that its process of read-only access has been in operation for some two years?

[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

That is not a figure that I have to hand, to be fair. We will look into that and get back to the noble Lord.

I am pleased to reassure noble Lords that our plan is for secondary legislation on the direct registration pilots to be introduced quickly after the Bill comes into force. Under the Bill, there is a statutory requirement for the Electoral Commission to evaluate the effectiveness of the pilots after they have finished.

With that, I thank noble Lords for the spirit and intention of their amendments; I hope that this information reassures them.